Breaking the Lithiation Barrier via Tailored-Design Facile Kinetic Pathways in TiO₂(B) Realizing 50C Ultrafast...

As a promising anode material for fast charging lithium-ion batteries, bronze-phase titanium dioxide (TiO₂(B)) still faces the challenge of sluggish Li⁺ diffusion kinetics in the solid phase during lithiation/delithiation processes. Herein, a facile synthetic strategy has been proposed to optimize the microstructure of TiO₂(B), which enables facilitated lithiation and therefore significantly improved rate performance. The rice-granular nanoparticles with precisely controlled aspect ratios (AR) can be obtained via manipulating the ligand concentrations that affect nucleation and oriented attachment processes, as well as adjusting the calcination temperatures to control the Oswald ripening process. As a result, the smaller ab plane in rice-granular TiO₂(B) enhances Li⁺ diffusion efficiency on C' site and inhibits the inhomogeneity of Li⁺ between inter and inside particles. Benefiting from breaking the Li⁺ diffusion kinetics, the rice-granular TiO₂(B) maintains a high specific capacity of 159.5 mAh g^-1 at 50C, with an excellent capacity retention ratio of 93.67% after 5000 cycles at 10C. This work provides an efficient and simple strategy to minimize the challenging lithiation paths in TiO₂(B) anode, and offers new opportunities for high rate battery design.